League of Legends Config: game.cfg, and the Teamfight Drop

League runs at a high frame rate on almost anything, which is why most optimisation advice for it is pointless. The thing worth fixing is narrower and more annoying: the moment five people use their abilities at once and your frame rate falls through the floor.

Last updated 1 August 2026 · League of Legends, Riot proprietary engine

Where the League config folder is

It is inside the game install, not in your documents or app data. Look for a Config folder in:

Riot Games\League of Legends\Config

Usually on your system drive, though the Riot installer lets you put it anywhere, so check where you actually installed it. The file you want is game.cfg.

Unlike CS2 or Apex, there is nothing to create and no launch option to add. The file is already there and already read; you are changing values, not introducing a mechanism.

Why your edits keep disappearing

Because the client writes the file when it closes, not when it starts. Edit it while any part of League is running and your version is replaced by the client's on exit.

This catches nearly everyone, and it is not obvious, because "close the game" is not enough — the launcher and the client are separate processes and the client is the one that saves. So:

1. Quit the game and the client. Fully — check the system tray.
2. Open Task Manager and confirm nothing named League or Riot is still running.
3. Now edit and save game.cfg.
4. Start the client. Your values are in place.

The teamfight drop, and the keys that address it

Less than in a shooter, and not in the way people mean. Your average is already high on almost any machine, so what is worth fixing is the drop during teamfights.

What happens in that moment is not a graphics load in the usual sense. Five champions cast abilities, and each one spawns particle systems, each with its own lighting and its own draw call. League's renderer is old and does much of that work on a single CPU thread, so the spike lands on your processor rather than your graphics card. That is why someone with a modern GPU still stutters in a fight: the GPU was never the problem.

Which makes the useful settings the ones that reduce work rather than resolution:

The frame cap itself is set with FrameCapType, which takes a mode number rather than an FPS value — one mode is a fixed cap, another is uncapped. The numbers have moved between patches, so the safe approach is to set your cap in the video menu first, close the client, then look at what number ended up in the file and keep it.

How much this is worth: the honest answer

Of the games we write configs for, League has the least to gain, and you should know that before you spend an evening on it.

The reason is structural, not a criticism. The engine is old and light, it was never demanding, and Riot has already tuned it for machines far below yours. There is no hidden renderer to unlock and no equivalent of an Unreal [SystemSettings] block that reaches past the menu. What you have is a modest list of documented keys, two of which are genuinely worth setting.

So calibrate what you expect: this is a consistency change, not a frame rate change. If your average is 240 and it falls to 90 in fights, the goal is to make that floor higher. Your average may not move at all, and that is the change working as intended rather than failing.

What a config cannot fix

Three things people try to solve here that are not settings problems:

• Client stutter and slow loading screens. The League client is a separate application built on a web stack, and nothing in game.cfg touches it. The game and the client share almost nothing.
• Ping and lag spikes. A network path, not a render setting. No key in this file affects it.
• A CPU that is genuinely the limit. Given the fight spike lands on the processor, this is the one that decides how much the keys above can do. Our bottleneck calculator is free, needs no account and takes about fifteen seconds — if you are heavily CPU-bound, the particle and threading keys are where your whole benefit lives and the graphics steps are noise.

Is editing game.cfg safe?

Yes, and the reasoning is the same as for any config file. game.cfg is the game's own settings store. The client writes to it every time you close, and every value in it is one the game put there or would accept from its own menu. Nothing is injected, no game file is patched, and no external program runs.

Anti-cheat looks for software reading or writing the game's memory and for programs sitting between you and the game. A settings file the client itself maintains is neither of those, which is also the reason to keep your changes inside it rather than reaching for a third-party tool.

The reversibility test: delete game.cfg, start the client, and it writes a fresh default one. There is no state to clean up, which makes this the safest file on this site to experiment with — you cannot lose anything except the video settings you would set again in a minute.

Editing it yourself, in four steps

1. Close the game and the client completely, and confirm in Task Manager. This is the step that matters most, for the reason above.
2. Copy game.cfg somewhere else first. It takes two seconds and it is your undo.
3. Open the original in Notepad. Change values in place, keep the [General] and [Performance] headers exactly as they are, and add nothing the file did not already contain.
4. Start the client, load a practice game, and check your video settings match what you wrote. If they do not, something was still running when you saved.

Where the numbers come from

The keys above are the general case. The ones that depend on your machine are the frame cap, which has to relate to what you sustain and to your refresh rate, and the quality steps, which depend on how much headroom your CPU has during a fight.

That is the part a guide cannot do for you, and it is what our generator does — you enter your CPU, GPU, RAM, resolution and refresh rate, and it writes game.cfg with those values filled in, plus a report explaining each line. Same keys as above, arithmetic done against your parts rather than a generic machine.